HEALTHTECH: How did Houston Methodist come to prioritize and innovate its approach to virtual care? What was your starting point?
PLETCHER: At the start of the pandemic, we needed to make sure that all physicians could pivot to use virtual platforms to deliver their visits. We needed to focus on a massive, warp-speed rollout of care redesign in the hospital environment, the intensive care unit, stroke and psychiatry, for example. Then we moved into monitoring and virtual nursing. Now, we’re moving forward into even bolder care redesign. Initially, it was trying to ensure that we could maintain access and excellent care quality despite the challenges of the pandemic.
HEALTHTECH: Tell us about the start of the journey to launch your virtual nursing program. How did you get buy-in from key stakeholders? How did you adapt to feedback?
PLETCHER: With virtual programs, you may have executive buy-in, but it’s a challenge with your end users. Sometimes it’s the other way around. And sometimes you’re struggling to get buy-in from everyone. It depends. For our program, it was a journey to get executive leadership’s commitment to make the investment and then to settle on an approach for the initial care model. We got input from our end users and married that with what we knew made sense from a strategy scale and an ROI perspective. But as soon as we put that service in front of end users, the buy-in and adoption were lightning fast.
For every health system program, if you’re not expanding and changing, there’s a problem. That’s certainly no different for our virtual programs. Virtual nursing has continued a systemwide rollout, and we’ll be layering in other service offerings as part of the care model. We’ve rolled out remote monitoring for the inpatient setting. We’re looking at leveraging a lot of these teams, tools and platforms to expand to other care areas, such as the home.
EXPLORE: Understand the importance of a clear vision for automation and AI in healthcare.
HEALTHTECH: Amid staffing and budget challenges, how do you keep innovation of care delivery a priority? What advice do you have for other healthcare organizations?
PLETCHER: It seems obvious, but make sure you’re actually doing something practical and useful with your innovation efforts instead of a parade of pilots or one-off playdates with cool toys that somebody saw at a conference. Be clear on an ROI. You may need to make different ROI arguments for the same program depending on your stakeholders.
Start with the knowledge of what you’re trying to achieve and make sure you align your innovation portfolio to the broader system strategy: Are you trying to expand your market? Are you trying to address workforce or cost concerns? Are you trying to enhance quality and safety? Are you trying to recruit and retain? Do you have population health considerations? Make sure that your innovation portfolio is aligned with where you’re going as a system.